William Grimes
Ann
Rule, whose 1980 study of the serial killer Ted Bundy, “The Stranger Beside
Me,” set her on the road to writing dozens of best-selling true-crime books
praised for their insight into criminal psychology, died on Sunday at a medical
center in Burien, Wash. She was 83.
The
cause was congestive heart failure and respiratory failure, said Scott
Thompson, a spokesman for CHI Franciscan Health, which operates the Highline
Medical Center in Burien.
Ms. Rule’s articles had been appearing
in the magazine True Detective for more than a decade when, in the mid-1970s,
fate delivered her biggest subject to her doorstep. She was working on a book
about a series of unsolved murders in the Seattle area when the police in Utah
arrested the man they believed to be the killer, a former law student named
Theodore Robert Bundy.
The name did more than ring a bell. In
the early 1970s Bundy had been a close friend and colleague, answering the
suicide hotline with her on the night shift at the Seattle crisis center where
they both volunteered.
Initially, Ms. Rule refused to believe
that Bundy was the killer. “For a long time I was holding out hope that he was
innocent, that somehow this all was a terrible mistake,” she told The Houston
Chronicle in 2003. “And it wasn’t just me, it was all the people who worked
with him.”
After Bundy escaped from jail and went
on a killing spree in Florida, Ms. Rule changed her mind, and the focus of her
book. Published in 1980, it became an instant best seller, admired for its
detailed accounts of police procedure, the work of criminal investigators and
courtroom drama, not to mention the author’s jailhouse interviews with Bundy.
The book, updated several times, was
made into a television movie, “Ann Rule Presents: The Stranger Beside Me,”
broadcast on the USA Network in 2003. Barbara Hershey took the role of Ms.
Rule, and Billy Campbell played Bundy, a man Ms. Rule described, in the 2009
edition of her book, as “a sadistic sociopath who took pleasure from another
human’s pain and the control he had over his victims, to the point of death,
and even after.”
Ann Rae Stackhouse
was born on Oct. 22, 1931, in Lowell, Mich. Her father, Chester R. Stackhouse,
known as Stack, was a college football, basketball and track and field coach
who took jobs all over the country, relocating the family again and again. Her
mother, the former Sophie Hansen, taught special education.
As a child, Ann was
surrounded by relatives in law enforcement: two sheriffs, a prosecuting
attorney and a medical examiner.
On summer
vacations in Stanton, Mich., where her maternal grandparents lived in the
building that housed the county jail, she helped her grandmother prepare meals
for the prisoners.
“I would pass
the tray through the slot in the pantry to the prisoners, and they were so
nice,” Ms. Rule told The Seattle Times in 2004. “So I would always ask my
grandpa, ‘How come they’re locked up?’ I wanted to know why some kids grew up
to be criminals and why other people didn’t. That is still the main thrust
behind my books: I want to know why these things happen, and so do my readers.”
After
graduating from high school in Coatesville, Pa., she earned a degree in
creative writing in 1953 from the University of Washington, where she also took
courses in abnormal psychology, criminology and penology.
She joined the
Seattle Police Department as a provisional officer but left after a year and
half when she failed the eye exam. She later earned an associate degree in
criminal justice at Highline Community College in Des Moines, Wash.
When her
husband, Bill Rule, left his job to go back to school, she began writing to
make money. (They divorced in 1972.)
Ms. Rule
started out freelancing for baby-care magazines, Sunday supplements and
true-confession magazines before moving on to publications like Cosmopolitan,
Ladies’ Home Journal, Good Housekeeping and Reader’s Digest.
She began
writing for True Detective in 1969 under the pseudonyms Arthur Stone, Chris
Hansen and Andy Stack, using male names at her editors’ insistence. She wrote
two 10,000-word articles a week for the next 13 years.
After the
success of the Bundy book, which she wrote under her own name, Ms. Rule wrote three books on serial killers as Andy Stack: “The Want-Ad
Killer,” “Lust Killer” and “The I-5 Killer.” She also wrote a novel,
“Possession,” loosely based on a murder in Oregon.
Soon she
settled into a productive routine, turning out about two books a year: a
hardcover title dealing with the investigation of a single crime, and a
paperback in the “Ann Rule’s Crime Files” series, which described a variety of
cases. Perhaps not surprising, given her subject matter, she wrote with a
wooden baseball bat and a gun at hand, telling interviewers that she saw the
world as a dangerous place.
“To choose a
book subject, I weed through about 3,000 suggestions from readers,” Ms. Rule
told a fan in a CNN chat room in 1999. “I’m looking for an ‘antihero’ whose
eventual arrest shocks those who knew him (or her): attractive, brilliant,
charming, popular, wealthy, talented, and much admired in their communities —
but really hiding behind masks.”
In a crowded
field, she consistently led the pack, taking up most of the real estate in the
true-crime shelves of bookstores. Reviewing “Dead by Sunset” for The New York
Times in 1995, Walter Walker wrote that Ms. Rule “brings to her work the
passion, the prodigious research and the narrative skill to create suspense
from a situation in which the outcome is a matter of fact, known to many
readers before they open the book.”
Her many books
include “Green River, Running Red,” “Bitter Harvest” and “Small Sacrifices,”
which was made into a television mini-series, broadcast on ABC in 1989, with
Ryan O’Neal and Farrah Fawcett.
Her latest
book, “Practice to Deceive,” about a 2003 murder on Whidbey Island, Wash., was
published in 2013.
Ms. Rule, who
lived in Normandy Park, Wash., is survived by her daughters Leslie Rule, a
writer of paranormal crime nonfiction, and Laura Harris; her sons Michael and
Andrew Rule and Bruce Sherles; and seven grandchildren and two
great-grandchildren.
To the end,
Ted Bundy, and “The Stranger Beside Me,” haunted her. “I really thought in
1980, when I wrote this book, that I could get it all out of my head, it would
be very cathartic, and I would never have to think about Ted Bundy again,” she
told The Houston Chronicle.
“And yet, he
just fascinated people, and he still does. I probably get two emails a day,
many of them from women who think they got away from him, and some of them are
so close, I think they did.”
__________________
Heart full of lies : a true story of desire and death
Every breath you take : a true story of obsession, revenge and murder
And never let her go : Thomas Capano, the deadly seducer
The End of the dream ; The golden boy who never grew up : and other true cases
A Rage to kill and other true cases
Bitter harvest : a woman's fury, a mother's sacrifice
In the name of love : and other true cases
Posession : a novel
Pequeños sacrificios
A Fever in the heart : and other true cases
You belong to me and other true cases
Everything she ever wanted : a true story of obsessive love, murder and betrayal
If you really loved me : a true story of desire and murder
Lust killer
The I-5 killer
The Want-ad killer
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